Introduction

With IntelliJ IDEA, you can connect your check-in comments with the bug tracker or any issues data base and navigate from committed changes to the issues related to these changes.

To enable this navigation, you need to specify a so called issue navigation pattern, which means:

Figure out an issue ID pattern, that is, a format according to which you will reference issues in commit messages, and define this issue pattern using a regular expression.

Define the link to the referenced issue by combining the URL address of your tracking system and a regular expression to identify the issue ID.

In other words, an issue navigation pattern maps an issue ID pattern in commit messages and URL addresses of referenced issues. As soon as IntelliJ IDEA encounters a match to the issue ID pattern in a commit message, the match is displayed as a link in the Changes and Version Control tool windows. If you mention several issues, all of them will show up as links. Clicking such link opens the matching issue in the browser according to the defined link.

Example

Issue ID pattern

The regular expression that defines the format in which issues are referenced in commit messages.

[A-Z]+\-\d+

This regular expressions matches all character strings that consist of two substrings separated by an n-dash character:

Substring 1: An unlimited number of upper case alphabetic characters.

Substring 2: An unlimited number of digital characters.

Issue link pattern

A combination of the URL address of your issue tracking system and a regular expression that identifies issues in it.

http://mytracker/issue/$0

Here $0 indicates a back reference to the entire match. This means that as soon as IntelliJ IDEA detects a match in a commit message, it is added to the URL address of the tracker as is.

Matching issue ID

IntelliJ IDEA detects the following reference to an issue in the commit message of interest:

MYPROJECT-110

Composed issue link

In accordance with the above issue navigation pattern, the detected matching reference is added to the URL of the tracker as is, so the link to the referenced issue is composed as follows:

http://mytracker/issue/MYPROJECT-110

Enabling navigation from commit messages to issues

To enable navigating from commit messages to issues related to them

Press Ctrl+Alt+S or choose File | Settings (for Windows and Linux) or IntelliJ IDEA | Preferences (for macOS) on the main menu, and then go to Version Control | Issue Navigation.

On the Issue Navigation page that opens, configure a list of issue navigation patterns by setting correspondence between issue patterns in commit messages and URL addresses of referenced issues.

If you are using JIRA or our bug tracking system YouTrack, click the Add JIRA pattern or Add YouTrack Pattern respectively, and type the URL to the installation of bug tracking system in question. IntelliJ IDEA adds the regular expression that defines such pattern automatically.

For other issue tracking systems, click the Add button to create a new entry or select an existing entry and click the Edit button. In the Add Issue Navigation Link dialog box that opens, specify the following: